A wind tower dwarfs a service truck at its base in the Echo wind farm project on Madison Farms recently outside of Echo. <BR><I>Staff photo by E.J. Harris

The transmission line that inspired so much passionate testimony at a Umatilla County planning meeting a few months ago is now going up along Highway 207.

Instead of wires, many of the poles are strung with small wheels. Follow them to their source, and one will find workers busily erecting one enormous windmill after another at the new Echo wind farm project.

So far, there are 13 completed windmills. They stand with their blades “feathered out” or laying flat so not to catch any wind. Each is 262.5 feet tall and has a rotor diameter of 269 feet. Each costs more than $3 million. The actual cost of the project as a whole is “commercially sensitive,” said Glenn Ikemoto, a partner in Oregon Windfarms, which is developing the project.

Soon there will be 38 windmills in the project, 20 in Morrow County and 19 in Umatilla County. With the wind blowing at a steady 25 miles per hour, they will generate 64 megawatts of power – enough to supply 16,000 homes. Over their lives they will produce the energy equivalent to 7 million barrels of oil or 3.6 million tons of coal. All while avoiding the production of more than 7 million tons of pollution in greenhouse gases.

The Echo wind farm project is unique in that the landowners will eventually own some of the windmills. Typically, a developer pays a landowner rent while retaining ownership of the machines.

“The good thing for us in Umatilla County is that, when we own these machines – yes, we hope to make money, but we’ll spend it in Umatilla County,” said Kent Madison, who will own three of the windmills.

To maintain the windmills, the project will hire four full-time workers.

The financial structure of the Echo wind farm is a tangled web. There are nine projects on the wind farm, including those owned by the developer, Oregon Windmills, and John Deere Renewables Inc., which financed the entire enterprise. Although individual projects’ owners have control of their windmills from the beginning, the lions share of their revenue will go toward paying off financing in the early years.

Most of the wind farm’s neighbors are happy about the windmills. The transmission line is another story. Dixie Echeverria, who lives along Highway 207, spearheaded an effort to stop the transmission line from running along the highway. She gathered statistics about the health dangers of stray voltage and the devaluation of land on which high-voltage lines were erected.

During a meeting of the Umatilla Planning Commission, Echeverria gave a presentation in which she highlighted concerns about the transmission lines. After the planning commission approved a land-use permit for the line, Echeverria and others appealed the decision to the board of commissioners. When the board of commissioner declined to change the planning commission’s decision, the group decided not to take their appeal to the state land use board of appeals.

Echeverria can now see several of the windmills, and the crew that every day puts a new pole in front of her house, from her kitchen window. She said she came home one day and saw several people from the crew walking in her corn field and had to warn them to get out.

“I mean, they sat right here and told me I wouldn’t be able to see the windmills,” she said. “But look – I can see them through my window.”

But Echeverria is philosophical about the new transmission line and the wind farm. It’s happening, she said, whether the people along Highway 207 want it or not.

Echeverria and her friends may take some comfort in knowing that Umatilla County Commissioners drove a hard bargain in their dealings with the developer and John Deere Renewables.

According to Doherty and Ikemoto, county commissioners and the project owners are just now finalizing a strategic investment plan, or SIP, a tax schedule that flattens out the amount of property taxes a project pays over time. Because wind farms rapidly depreciate under current tax regimes, they usually pay most of their taxes in the first five years. Under the SIP, the Echo Windfarm project will pay $800,000 per year for the first five years, and then $640,000 for the following 10 years. The extra amount in the first five years, Ikemoto said, were county-negotiated concessions.

“Dennis Doherty beat us up,” Ikemoto said

The SIP is “uniformly better” for the county than a regular tax schedule, Ikemoto said, because the project will end up paying more taxes in the long run.